Turning Red: Why Mei's Mom's Red Panda Is So Much Bigger
Warning! This article contains SPOILERS for Turning Red
In Disney’s latest Pixar movie, Turning Red, Mei Lee (Rosalie Chiang) shapeshifts into a red panda, symbolizing the struggle of dealing with emotions, only to find out that her mother, Ming (Sandra Oh), does the same thing, but as a significantly larger panda. In fact, her mom’s panda is laughably big, enormous really, but reading between the lines of the narrative can help to understand why this is. The movie has been compared to Pixar’s Inside Out, another emotionally-driven, coming-of-age tale, but the symbols the two use to convey its message are vastly different.
In Turning Red, after Ming’s amulet that keeps her from shapeshifting breaks, her emotions overwhelm her, and she turns into a Godzilla-sized red panda. However, Mei’s panda was always much smaller throughout the movie in comparison, and when her aunties and grandmother make an appearance, they, too, are closer to Mei’s size. The climax of the movie involves Ming tracking down her daughter, raging through the streets in her large panda form while Mei is with her friends attending a concert by the fictional Turning Red boy band, 4*Town.
Related: How Turning Red Fits In Pixar’s Shared Universe Theory
The movie never directly answers why Ming appears to be so outrageously large, but there are a few possibilities that could explain why the choice was made to have her appear as such. One reason could be the fact that Ming’s emotions have been pent up for so long and controlled by this amulet, rather than working through them and allowing herself to express them in healthier ways than keeping it all bottled up. The other reason may be because of the creative influences Turning Red’s writer and director Domee
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